Never Let Go
by sex-intheimpala
Summary: What if when Jo died, Dean kept her gun, and now she is tied to it and has been following them around? Prompt from avengingpeople-huntingthings for Chestervelle Digest.


Dean unlocked the door to their latest motel room, complete with two dingy double beds and tacky wallpaper. Sam closed the door behind them, and the brothers shrugged out of their FBI suit jackets. Before going to hang them up, Sam caught Dean's worried eyes, and silently reassured him.

Dean rested his bag on the kitchen table and unzipped it, pulling out a short rifle. It was unloaded, just as it had been for years. The handle was stained with dried blood, but he would rather see the blood soaking her blonde hair again than burn it off.

He set it on the table, and Jo Harvelle flickered to life in front of him.

"Why'd you leave me in the car?" she asked, her hands on her hips. Even dead, she packed one hell of an attitude. "I could have helped."

"I know," he said. "You could knock this case out of the water." He grinned at her. Dean lived for these moments, when their constant bickering reminded him of the years before Jo's death. As he headed for the television, he wanted to close his hand around her shoulder, like he used to. But ever since they discovered that Jo's spirit had latched onto her gun, everything was different. Because Jo was a ghost. _You can't touch her anymore_, Dean repeated in his mind. Every time he wanted to twirl her blonde hair around his fingers or kiss her temple, he couldn't, and it hurt him more and more. There was something building in the pit of his stomach, and he felt like she could tell.

Instead, his hand hovered in midair before he dug his nails into his palm to distract himself.

That night, he helped Jo sit at the kitchen table and she watched the brothers eat. Dean always tried to keep her smiling, always talking cars or poker or monsters and snagging a bite of his burger when she went on a rant.

Somewhere past midnight, Sam shut his laptop and crawled into bed, and was asleep in seconds. That meant that Dean and Jo could start their nightly ritual – ghost practice.

Dean set a bullet on the table between them. "You can do it."

Jo's eyebrows knit together as she put all of her might into the piece of metal. If only it would roll, Dean knew that Jo would be over the moon for days. But as hard as she willed the bullet to move, the only change was that her face turned red with strain.

"Just focus," he told her.

She tried again, without success. She relaxed her face and let out a breath running her hands over her eyes. "I can't do it, Dean." Her voice sounded heavy, like she was on the edge of crying. But Jo would never let Dean see her cry.

He felt like he might spill over at any moment, too, so he rubbed the back of his neck and stood up. He went to her side of the table and pulled her chair out so she could stand. "I'm wiped," he said. "Are you sure you don't want the bed?" At first, Dean had insisted that Jo should take the second bed, but every night for years, she made the same argument and settled for sleeping on the floor.

Jo nodded, "I can't even feel the mattress, Dean. You take it."

"Okay," he said, putting a pillow from his bed on the floor by the TV. He knew she didn't need it, but his sympathy for her was overwhelming. She lay down with her hands clasped under her cheek and smiled at his towering figure above her.

"Goodnight," she said, closing her eyes.

Dean drew his duvet cover over her pale body and crossed the room back to his bed. He settled underneath the thin sheet and switched off the lamp beside him.

"Goodnight, Jo."

That night, in his dream, Dean relived visiting the scene of the crime of their latest case, of a car on a lonely highway in New York State. The man inside sat with his eyes glassy and open, his throat slit.

Sam's eyes narrowed to the man's gaping neck, and suddenly everything made sense. He explained to Dean that he'd come across this before, so many years ago that the blonde girl on the side of the road in his memory was growing hazy.

"His throat – the blood is smudged. Kind of like the demon collected it."

Dean's eyebrows went up. "You mean, like Meg?" His stomach was in knots – he didn't want Jo to find out. She'd joined the brothers on the road three years ago, and hasn't once gone all vengeful spirit on them. But with Meg potentially back in the picture, he was worried that Jo's pursuit for revenge for her death would take her away from him, for real this time.

Dean shot up in bed, and even though he was crammed into a motel room with her, Jo was starting to feel so far away. The digital clock on the bedside table read that it was a quarter after one. He rubbed at his face and just tried to shake the pit in his stomach, but it was no use. He tore away the sheet and crawled out of bed, kneeling beside Jo where she slept, barely breathing. He lay beside her.

He had spent countless hours of the past few years memorizing Jo. For the brief few hours when he thought he'd never see her again, just after her death, he panicked, because her last moments had started to cloud their years of friendship. Now that he had her back, he studied her like he studied John's journal – thoroughly and without breaking focus. He kept reviewing the details. Her eyelids were purplish, like a faint bruise, and her lips were full but cracked. In general, she was a little greyer in color than she was alive. But he didn't care.

As Dean dosed off beside her, Jo's eyes flickered open. She took in the sight of him asleep, the only time when he was at peace with the world. She loved the way he looked with that part in his lips. Carefully, she slid her arm out from underneath the heavy duvet and caressed the air around his stubbled cheek, tracing the air along his strong nose. It was unhealthy how much she loved him.

She reached for his hair, setting her jaw. Where her fingertips met his hair, something raced through her body, but she felt nothing on her fingers.

"Focus," she told herself.

But still, when she went to touch him, nothing happened.

She let her hands drop to the floor, and, knowing that Dean was fast asleep, let the tears fall that had been building in her for months. She was overjoyed when she rejoined the Winchesters, and understanding of her limitations as she grew accustomed to her new form. But she could never get the hang of manipulating the physical stuff – shutting doors and knocking over everything wasn't her strong suit. But after three years of living with Dean, and several more of loving him, being trapped like she was took its toll. In one last, feeble attempt, she reached for his lips, those lips that were the second thing she noticed about this man, second only to those eyes that made her feel like she was lying barefoot in a field of grass at dawn.

And underneath her skin, she felt him.

Her touch woke him up, startling him out of his sleep. His hand went to his mouth and felt her hand on his lips, tightened around it and just held on. He wore that expression that she loved – half lost and half relieved. And Jo just smiled, a small curve of her lips, as more tears settled on her cheeks. She didn't care that Dean could see her, but she didn't know why.

Dean reached for her face and held her, wiping them clean with his thumbs.

"You have no idea how much I've missed you, Jo."

Her smile grew. "Yeah," she said. "I think I do."

When he kissed her for the second time, and for the third, and for the fourth, they caught up with the three years' worth of what they had both missed out on. Not until afterwards did either of them remember Sam sleeping only six feet away, for something in both of them decided they would never let go.


End file.
